Over the past year, ELLE DECOR has asked artisans to create unique items—with no price tag—for each issue’s Not for Sale column. Now, in partnership with Christie’s, each of these pieces will be auctioned off to benefit charity.
Artist: Madina Visconti
Title: The Wave Cuff
Year created: 2018
Medium: Bronze cuffs (qty 2)
Edition: Unique
Height (inches): 3
The lost-wax process, or cire perdue, is a time-honored casting technique in which molten metal is poured into a mold formed by a wax model. Although it sounds simple, the process is painstaking and requires a highly skilled and patient artisan. The ancient Greeks employed it to cast large-scale statues; Auguste Rodin used it to sculpt his iconic Gates of Hell; and in a foundry on the outskirts of Milan, Madina Visconti di Modrone—a descendant of one of the legendary Italian houses of Visconti and daughter of the famed furniture and jewelry designer Osanna Visconti di Modrone—uses the method to craft statement jewelry with a contemporary sensibility. Like its lost-wax forebears, this unique Wave cuff, polished by hand, will stand the test of time.
Madina grew up in Milan, in a family of artists and industrialists, where creativity always played a crucial role. As a result, Madina grew up firmly believing that all types of creativity is Art and she started looking for her own way to express herself by getting in touch with nature, which has become her first source of inspiration. From then on, all her pieces have reflected a dualism that can be found in nature, being both strong and romantic at the same time. In addition to this, Madina’s sense of aesthetics brought her to rediscover the family’s treasures and to project them into the modern era. Breaking the clichè that a family ornament must be haute joillaire, Madina creates timeless pieces through her contemporary eye as a new symbol of the mother- daughter heritage. The same attention to detail and the accurate craftsmanship, that is generally linked to the haute joaillerie concept, is now, for the first time, given to bronze and silver, which have been purposely left raw, in order to let the artisan hand be seen. The result is a sophisticated and enduring piece.